Engineering at Nova Credit

Bonded by Our Mission

Nova Credit's mission is to power a fair and inclusive financial system for the world, driven by the belief that everyone deserves a fair chance to improve their economic condition. Access to credit is a crucial tool for this, providing a safety net for unexpected circumstances and unlocking goods and services essential for a prosperous life—from putting food on the table to accessing education and critical healthcare.

Despite this importance, over 100 million Americans struggle to access the credit system. For the past 10 years, Nova Credit has been building a better system that now serves millions of Americans previously overlooked by legacy methods.

This mission is deeply personal for many of us, as many Novans are first or second-generation immigrants who have experienced the credit challenge firsthand or watched loved ones struggle. Nova Credit was founded in 2016 by three co-founders who met at Stanford. As immigrants they faced difficulties building credit and securing a lease in a new country. This challenge inspired our first product, Credit Passport® (YC16!), which has helped thousands of newcomers around the world access credit.

Today, we serve over 7,000 businesses, including household names like JPMorgan Chase and AT&T, and help millions of consumers more fairly apply for the financial products they need. Our reach has expanded to serve all consumers typically locked out of the credit system whether newcomers to the US or Americans with thin or no credit.

Building Our Products

Our products bring our mission to life, enabling millions of consumers to more fairly apply for the financial products they need. Leveraging Node.js, Typescript, Python, PostgresSQL, and AWS, here are the products you'd be working on:

We retrieve and translate credit histories from an expansive global footprint, helping immigrants leverage their financial past in a new country. The technical challenge? Every international credit system is unique; we must set up servers around the world, standardize diverse data schemas in real-time, all while maintaining rigorous regulatory compliance.

We fetch and transform raw bank transaction data into thousands of granular risk signals to help lenders make better decisions. This is high-availability infrastructure that major financial institutions depend on, requiring sub-second latency and near-perfect reliability while processing massive, complex financial datasets.

We help consumers instantly verify their income in support of a loan or lease application through multi-source verification that offers dramatic efficiency gains over manual processes, bolstered by built-in fraud detection. We're serving a vast network of businesses that rely on our speed and accuracy.

We help Americans in need of affordable housing cut eligibility verification times from weeks to minutes. By aggregating data from banks, payroll systems, and government benefits, we help get qualified families into homes faster.

Engineering Our Values: How We Work

Our four core values aren't just words—they're how our engineers work every day. Here's what that actually looks like:

Make It Your Mission: Start-to-Finish Ownership

Engineers at Nova Credit don't just write code—they own outcomes. You'll start with product brainstorming with cross-functional team members (legal & compliance, pre and post-sales, design, and product), eventually deploy your work to prod, and do everything in between. When you're building a platform that powers credit decisions for major financial institutions, ownership means something real. You'll collaborate with our compliance team to ensure we're FCRA-compliant and see your code process real credit applications within days of shipping.

What this looks like in practice:

Driving 0→1 product launches: When we built Eligibility Compass™ from scratch, one of our engineers stepped up as lead to bring clarity to ambiguity. She kept the team organized across multiple sub-projects, ensured thorough testing, and drove an on-time delivery of this new product that's now helping families get into affordable housing faster.

Unlocking new markets: Another engineer dove deep to drive the A2A XML mapping for a major credit bureau integration that unlocked access in the UAE region. Working closely with data science and solution architects, he became the subject matter expert and delivered a high-quality launch that's now informing our strategy for future regional expansions.

Stepping in when it matters: When our Product and Partnership teams went through transitions, another engineer filled the gap to ensure we maintained service continuity and compliance with one of our highest- volume Credit Passport® bureaus. She drove the API migration implementation and became the primary point of contact with the bureau—owning both the technical work and the relationship.

Whether you're optimizing our Cash Atlas™ API to maintain sub-500ms response times or integrating a new international credit bureau into Credit Passport®, you own the outcome.

Build Bridges: Crossfunctional Collaboration is Key

Our organization is built around high-impact vertical teams where engineers have true end-to-end ownership. From data integration to user experience, each vertical team is responsible for the full lifecycle of their products. Building bridges means going above and beyond to foster relationships with colleagues and others who bring the mission to life—whether that's engineering working closely with compliance, partnering with deployment/post-sales on implementation feedback, or teaming up with pre-sales to understand client needs.

What this looks like in practice:

One sprint you might be integrating a new data aggregator. Next, you're improving the UX for consumer facing interfaces or working closely with our GTM team on high-profile launches. You can lead a virtual team bonding event, help plan our next offsite, sit in on sales meetings, or contribute to sourcing and recruiting efforts. If that sounds exhausting, this probably isn't the place. If it sounds exciting? Welcome aboard.

Before starting a new project, engineers write up their project plan—including required architectural changes, pros/cons of various options, and rollout strategy. The project plan is shared across the entire Engineering org to encourage cross-team feedback and knowledge sharing. We value intellectual humility and acknowledge the limits of our own perspectives.

Challenge Without Ego: Overcommunication & Truth-Seeking

The transparency our leaders have with the rest of the company about board meetings, timelines, and dissenting opinions creates a culture where Novans feel comfortable speaking up. Our CEO and Co-founder, Misha Esipov, maintains bi-weekly office hours—any Novan can attend to ask work-related questions, shoot the breeze, or get coached on back-flipping (kidding, but Misha has been known to do celebratory backflips when we reach big milestones)! At the end of every all-hands, anyone can ask questions live or via Zoom chat. New Novans are often surprised when they're called on to "challenge without ego" starting their first week or two—we value those fresh eyes!

What this looks like in practice:

Almost all of the work we do requires cross-functional expertise and teamwork, so we rely on open communication about details, requirements, deadlines, and processes. We are heavily biased toward giving too much information rather than not enough.

We host feedback training regularly to provide each employee with the tools to have productive conversations. It's important for us to give feedback to one another in a way that is professional and respectful, keeping team interests top of mind. We also make it a priority to acknowledge contributions—our #thanks Slack channel is very active with shoutouts, and we end our monthly all-hands with a few folks giving a "Nova Credit" to any colleague who has demonstrated one of our company values.

An example of our truth-seeking culture is our blameless and cross-functional postmortem process. Incidents are a rite of passage in building something great, but they're also great learning opportunities. We use postmortems to document incidents, analyze root causes and outcomes, and identify action items to prevent recurrence.

​Chug Like a Train: Fast‒Paced Environment

We believe velocity is a feature. In our environment, engineers are empowered to make high‒stakes decisions even when information is incomplete. We move too fast for 'perfect' to be the baseline. Instead, we prioritize technical judgment and the ability to iterate.

What this looks like in practice:

We operate at massive scale, processing a vast volume of reports while maintaining near‒perfect uptime. We deploy continuously. When a major financial institution like JPMorgan Chase or AT&T gives us feedback, we move with urgency—refining documentation, expanding analytics capabilities, or resolving integration issues in hours or days, not weeks.

But velocity doesn't mean recklessness. The code we ship has real‒world implications for people's financial lives. A bug could mean someone doesn't get approved for housing or a credit card they deserve. So while we move fast, we maintain high quality standards through comprehensive testing, monitoring, and that blameless postmortem process.

If you prefer exhaustive specs and long deliberation cycles, this might not be the right fit. If you find energy in building, shipping, and refining at the speed of the market, you'll thrive here.

Investing in Our Team

Our People

Novans hail from all walks of life and we take great pride in having assembled such a vibrant and driven team. Many Novans are parents or caregivers, while others are just starting their careers. We have Novans working in 5 countries and a third of our workforce consists of immigrants.

Our team is fairly dispersed, but well connected: we maintain a standalone office in the Flatiron District in NYC (around the corner from Eataly and Madison Square Park), and several WeWork spaces in San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, and London. We gather for happy hours, museum visits, dinners of every culinary genre (hot pot is a company favorite), and sportingevents, with a designated social committee in our NYC office.

To support our fully remote workforce, we have Connected@Nova, an ERG where remote employees stay connected to their colleagues across distances. #Nova-Bookclub was born from Connected@Nova given thenumber of avid readers on the team. In the same spirit, one of our longest-tenured Novans coordinates an annual Jólabókaflód book exchange near the holidays, where colleagues send surprise books and sweet treats to one another.

To get to know one another better, we'll lovingly put you in the "hot seat" from time to time (if you agree to it, of course). It's a fun opportunity to answer questions like "Who is on your Mount Rushmore of icons?" or "If you could have one sauce come out of your belly button, at will, what would it be?" You'll also find colleagues in #overheardatnova, #tv-club (Love Island, RHOBH, or Severance, anyone?), #doggos, #cats (our pets are the true VIPs at Nova Credit), and #nova_minis (where parents/caregivers/aunties/uncles share pics of their fave little ones). At our annual company offsite we have a tradition that's been going on since our first gathering: Nova Jeopardy. It's created and hosted by current Novans, quizzing our team on anything from historical company metrics to frequently used Slack emojis—always unhinged in the most fun way possible!

Finally, we love bringing our dispersed team together IRL, and commit to a multi-night company offsite each year, along with set budgets for Engineering team offsites. In the past, we've met up in places like Mexico City, San Diego, Denver, Lake Tahoe, The Poconos, Salt Lake City and Philadelphia.

Growth & Development

The growth of the company is directly correlated with every Novan's growth. Novans leverage their professional development budget for personal, long-term career growth. Nova Credit invests in in-person team and company offsites, professional events, tools, and resources. You can have matched 1:1s with peers and mentors or join community events.

There's been quite a bit of lateral and upward mobility recently. One developer was eager to get more involved with go-to-market initiatives but wanted her role to remain technical—the team facilitated a transition to Solutions Architecture. Another software engineer was recently promoted from independent contributor to technical lead. On average, our engineers stay 3.5 years—significantly above the 2-3 year industry average for tech sector software engineers. Some of our longest-tenured employees sit in the engineering organization, one having been here since 2017.

NovaVersary Travel

In the spirit of being an international company serving an international community, Nova Credit encourages employees to explore the world with our NovaVersary gift. On your annual work anniversary, you'll get a generous travel stipend for flight or lodging, anywhere in the world. Novans who reach 4 years get a stipend for themselves and a travel buddy! Why? Because our company was founded to make global mobility possible, and we believe traveling can be one of the best ways to grow as a person and recharge your batteries. Novans have used their stipends for trips to the Maldives, Japan, Italy, Hawaii, Curacao, Thailand, New Zealand, Singapore, France, China, Greece, Panama, and the Philippines.

Our interview process:

• First Screen with a People Team member

• Coding challenge + mini system design

• Virtual Onsite where you'll meet 1:1 with key stakeholders as you work through a longer system design project + behavioral interviews

• Interview with our CEO

• Reference Check

Review our complete list of benefits for US employees here.